For a time, my mother supported her children as a hairdresser. She was skilled at her job, and it was always entertaining to hang out after school in the shop while she finished her work; one heard extraordinary stories as she straightened hair, or cut it. When I first read Eudora Welty’s story “Petrified Man,” I felt as though the author had been sitting in a corner of my mother’s beauty parlor, writing things down the entire time I was growing up; indeed, part of what fascinated me about the tale was its description of a little boy who listened to stories just as I listened to stories.

“Petrified Man” appeared in Welty’s first collection, “A Curtain of Green,” from 1941, and it’s a great book, steeped in the humor and tragedy of her native Mississippi. The Welty narratives I liked best didn’t have loads of whimsy. She was at her strongest, it seemed to me, when she was tough-minded about her characters’ tough lives. Her second book, the short novel “The Robber Bridegroom,” appeared a year later. Borrowing from a Brothers Grimm story and the Cupid and Psyche myth, Welty’s version centers on a man named Jamie Lockhart, who lives a double life in Rodney, Mississippi. He’s a bandit who would steal the coins off a dead man’s eyes, but he’s not invulnerable to love. The sweet and trusting Rosamond enters his life—in truth, he steals her—when he meets her father, Clement Musgrove, a planter. Rosamond is hungry for love, in part because her evil stepmother, Salome, doesn’t trust her. But Rosamond shouldn’t feel singled out; Salome hates the world.

It’s those dichotomies—the split between good and evil—that make the book intermittently interesting to me, and less so its lighthearted tone. But that does make it good material for a musical, which is what the composer Robert Waldman and the lyricist Alfred Uhry (who also wrote the book) turned it into, in 1975. Now Alex Timbers, who directed “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” and the strange musical of “Rocky,” is taking the work on, and I can’t wait to see what he makes of the piece (in previews, at the Laura Pels). Timbers likes exploring the musical form’s dark underbelly; he doesn’t shy away from the shadowy areas of life. Neither does “The Robber Bridegroom.” In the end, it’s not so much a simple Welty love song as it is the somewhat recessive single lady’s complicated response to love. ♦